[In the essay below, Kerrigan discusses the ambiguous role that remembrance plays in Elizabethan revenge tragedies—especially The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet—tracing this motif to the classical Greek dramatic theme of introspection.]

At the start of The Libation Bearers, Orestes stands beside his father's tomb, thinking about the past. Apparently sunk in passive grief, he offers Agamemnon a lock of hair and laments that he was not in Argos to mourn at his funeral. Then, however, retrospection modulates into a cry for revenge: ‘Zeus, Zeus, grant me vengeance for my father's / murder. Stand and fight beside me, of your grace’ (17-18). Exactly the same movement of feeling is experienced by Electra when she, in turn, comes to the tomb with the chorus of libation bearers. Recalling the circumstances of Agamemnon's murder, she shifts abruptly to revenge: ‘father, I pray that your avenger come, that they / who killed you shall be killed in turn’ (143-4). Electra's prayer is answered. She finds the hair, and it matches her own; her feet fit into the prints left by her brother; and then Orestes steps forward, persuaded by what she has said that she will not betray him. In the vibrant passage which follows, brother, sister, and Chorus unite in reminding each other, the dead king, and the audience of the bloody deed performed in the first part of the trilogy. Here, even more clearly, thoughts of the past stir revenge: ‘[Remember]¹ that bath, father, where you were stripped of life’, urges Orestes. ‘[Remember] the casting net that they contrived for you’, responds Electra (491-2). A clamour of stichomythia begins, and it is only contained when the Chorus says:

None can find fault with the length of this discourse you drew out, to show honor to a grave and fate unwept before. The rest is action. Since your heart is set that way, now you must strike and prove your destiny.

(510-13)

At this point it becomes clear that temporal relations have changed. The Chorus hints at delay, and Orestes' evasive response—‘So. But I am not wandering from my strict course / when I ask …’ (514-15)—does not refute it. Identifying a paradox which recurs in revenge tragedy, Aeschylus shows the past inciting violence but notices how retrospection can offer its own satisfactions and draw an avenger back from his task. In this chapter, I want to demonstrate how this ambiguity can operate to dramatic effect at high levels of structural and psychological detail by examining two major plays of the English Renaissance—The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet—and by relating both to a late version of Benoît's story of Orestès, in John Pykeryng's Elizabethan morality drama, Horestes.

Greek retrospection: Elizabethan remembrance. Aeschylus' revengers, like the Orestes and Electra of Sophocles and Euripides, have no memory of their father. They know about his life and death only because it is public knowledge. In the opening lines of The Libation Bearers Orestes says that his youth was spent in exile (6-7). Electra was in the palace when Agamemnon returned from Troy, but she must ask the Chorus to ‘tell of how my father was murdered’ because she was locked away, like a dog (445-7). The Chorus is, in fact, chief mediator of the past in Argos, and its mode of recall is impersonal. In the glorious passage beginning ‘Numberless, the earth breeds / dangers …’ (585 ff.) the chanting dancers place the murder of Agamemnon in the same long perspective as the legends of Althaea, Scylla, and the Lemnian women. Clytemnestra and her husband are not named in the strophe which describes them. Like the other killers and victims of a myth-filled past, they are recalled with that same awestruck detachment as we ‘Remember … the storm and wrath of the whirlwind’ (592-3). This choric speech is to The Libation Bearers what the catalogue of ships is to the Iliad (II. 494-877). An act of cultural celebration, an opening of the archive,² it ends with words which set Agamemnon's murder in the dark backward and abysm of time: ‘Delayed in glory, pensive from / the murk, Vengeance brings home at last / a child, to wipe out the stain of blood shed long ago’ (649-51). Tellingly, the ‘child’ here is not Orestes, but the murder which he, as the agent of collective memory, will effect.³

Other views of the past were available. In Sophocles' Electra, for instance, even the dead ‘remember’ (e.g. 482-3). A witness to and sign of atrocity (marturion and sēma), the murdered corpse is an object which, by virtue of what has marked it, leaves those traces in the mind-stuff which characterize, in antiquity, memories.⁴ By virtue of such thinking, Sophocles' Chorus can impute remembrance to the axe which struck down Agamemnon as well as to the dead king's body (482-7). As Michèle Simondon remarks, ‘The memory of the axe is … an objective memory merging itself with the material trace, marturion of the crime.’⁵ Euripides is interested in signs at once more personal and less determinate. The Old Man in his Electra brings brother and sister together by pointing to the charactēr formed by the scar on Orestes' brow, the sumbolon stamped above his eye when ‘he slipped and drew / blood as he helped you chase a fawn’ (572-4). Revealingly, however, though Electra says ‘I see the mark (tekmērion)’, and accepts her brother's identity, she does not say that she remembers the fall, or even that she remembers him. This is in keeping with a tragedy where revenge is motivated by ressentiment. Only residual reference is made, here, to Orestes' recall (through the collective memory) of his father. And when, in the Orestes, he prays to Agamemnon, it is not for assistance in killing Aegisthus. He hopes—both selfishly and vainly (since the dead appear to have forgotten him)—to prevent the Argolid assembly from condemning him to death, then looks for help in murdering Helen.⁶

Elizabethan revenge tragedy deals in renown and ressentiment, but it replaces Aeschylean exteriority with recollections which fluctuate between fame and inward memory. When Thomas Heywood's Orestes kills Egistus and cries ‘oh Agamemnon, / How sacred is thy name and memory!’,⁷ he is not saying that he only remembers the dead king through public knowledge. Far from being a stranger to his father, he was among those who welcomed him to the palace on his return from Troy.⁸ While Aeschylus helps us see that ‘What the Greeks hoped to achieve for the dead was perpetual remembrance, by strangers as well as kin,’⁹ revengers like Vindice and Chapman's Clermont D'Ambois are possessed of piercingly individual memories of lost mistresses, brothers, and fathers. These intimate recollections are often, as in The Spanish Tragedy, shared with the theatre audience. In Kyd, objects held as mementos combine with a sweepingly explicit rhetoric to publish Hieronimo's bond with Horatio. But the memories disclosed by Hamlet imply others, lying deeper, unspoken. Receding into remembrance (and the equally obscure processes of forgetting), the prince excludes his audience, and, in the process, wins a depth and secrecy unlike anything to be found in Greek drama.

This would be of less interest if there were no link between Shakespeare and Aeschylus. Evidence is growing, however, that Elizabethan playwrights knew more ancient tragedy than Seneca. Emrys Jones's ponderable claim that the Roman revenge plays, Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar, were influenced by Latin versions of Euripides' Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis,¹⁰ has been extended by Louise Schleiner. She proposes that Hamlet is indebted to one of the Latin translations of the Orestes available during the sixteenth century, and that the play is partly based on Jean de Saint-Ravy's Latin rendering of the two-part redaction of The Oresteia which was standard in the sixteenth century.¹¹ The latter presumably lies behind Chettle and Dekker's lost tragedies on Agamemnon and Orestes' Furies, produced in 1599 (the year before Hamlet), for the medieval version of the story, as it runs from Benoît to Pykeryng, gives no account of Orestès' madness. Certainly it is difficult, when we see Barnardo and Francisco scanning the battlements in the first scene of Hamlet, not to think of the apprehensive Herald on the roof of the palace in Argos at the beginning of The Oresteia. And the sequence this chapter began from has similarities with Hamlet v. i. As Schleiner observes, ‘When Hamlet and Horatio meditate on death, hear an approaching party of mourners, then “couch” behind cover to eavesdrop on the rituals at the tomb of an unquiet soul … the scene breathes the very air of the opening scene of the Choephori (in effect the third scene in the Saint-Ravy Latin Agamemnon), where Orestes and Pylades, having meditated upon the dead king, hear a procession approaching and duck behind cover to eavesdrop on the mourners trying to give rest to the troubled dead.’¹² This chapter will bring out differences between Aeschylus' scene and its Christianized equivalent in Shakespeare, and, more largely, between ancient and Renaissance principles of tragic representation. It will also take the view, however, that, without an awareness of the long history of revenge tragedy, and, in particular, of the part played in it by classical drama, something must be lost from our readings of The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet.

When Kyd's Hieronimo finds his son in the arbour, hanged and run through with swords, he thinks of more than revenge. Dipping Horatio's ‘handkercher’ or ‘napkin’ into his wounds, he declares:

Seest thou this handkercher besmear'd with blood?
It shall not from me till I take revenge:
Seest thou those wounds that yet are bleeding fresh?
I'll not entomb them till I have reveng'd:
Then will I joy amidst my discontent,
Till then my sorrow never shall be spent.(13)

(II. v. 51-6)

Hieronimo sets out to secure retribution by equipping himself with objects charged with remembrance: the corpse, a surrogate ghost to whet his purpose should it ever blunt, and the gory napkin, a memento to be carried near his heart. In the previous, first act of the play, after describing the death of Don Andrea in the war between Spain and Portugal, Horatio told Bel-imperia: ‘This scarf I pluck'd from off his liveless arm, / And wear it in remembrance of my friend’ (I. iv. 42-3). This scarf, as Bel-imperia explains, had been given by her to Andrea as a love token—a token which she in turn grants Horatio. Kyd introduced the handkercher to extend this chain of remembrances. His play has often been criticized for dividing between two centres of interest—Andrea's revenge and Horatio's—and thus for making redundant, by the end of Act II, those framing figures whose comments punctuate and ultimately direct the action: the ghost of Don Andrea and the spirit of Revenge.¹⁴ But the scarf and handkercher, complementary emblems of remembrance, tie one plot into the other, and focus The Spanish Tragedy around the relationship between memory and revenge.

In the first scene of the play, Andrea had risen from the underworld, like the Fury in Seneca's Thyestes, and told us that, after his body was buried by Horatio, his spirit crossed ‘the flowing stream of Acheron’, pleased Cerberus ‘with honey'd speech’ and presented itself to three judges. Aeacus deemed that the proper place for Andrea was among lovers on the ‘fields of love’, but Rhadamanth objected that ‘martial fields’ better suited the soldier. It was left to Minos, the third judge, ‘to end the difference’, by sending the spirit further into Hades to consult a higher authority. The dialectical nature of Minos's judgment¹⁵ is echoed in the structure of the underworld: Andrea must take ‘the middle path’ of three if he is to reach Pluto's court. Interestingly, Virgil, Kyd's authority for most of the speech, reports in Book VI of the Aeneid that there are two paths, not three. Kyd clearly had some special purpose in establishing that, in the underworld, the road to justice leads through and beyond alternatives—and that it leads, in the end, to the Revenge which personifies (in Pluto's court) Proserpine's ‘doom’. What the play shows is this journey becoming a pattern for Hieronimo's vengeance: though the Knight Marshal inhabits a more or less contemporary Spain, he explores the same moral landscape as the spirit of Andrea. In one way, indeed, he is compelled to travel towards Revenge, for the goddess of his play, Proserpine, has granted Andrea a providential as well as a judgemental ‘doom’, and Hieronimo is the instrument of her will. But in another sense—one readily available to audiences schooled in the paradoxes of predestinarian Calvinism—he actively chooses to make the journey; and he does so because of remembrance.

The Knight Marshal is contemplating a hellish pilgrimage as early as III. ii. 1-52. ‘The ugly fiends do sally forth of hell,’ he says, ‘And frame my steps to unfrequented paths.’ Dreams of remembrance (‘direful visions’ in which he sees the ‘wounds’ of his son) have made him susceptible to such temptation. At this stage, however, memory can provoke nothing but frustration, for Hieronimo does not yet know who murdered Horatio. He is caught between desire for action and an intolerable, tormenting patience, and the strain tells on his sanity. He thinks that everything must be caught up in his anguished dilemma. As Empson says in his poem ‘Let it Go’, at the borders of madness, ‘The contradictions cover such a range’:

Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night, and day,
See, search, shew, send, some man, some mean, that may—
                                                                                                                                            A letter falleth.

Seeking a ‘mean’ (both ‘opportunity’ and ‘middle course’), Hieronimo hunts the kind of path along which Minos sent Andrea to Revenge. He finds it when Bel-imperia's letter falls from the stage balcony, telling him how to break the deadlock and advance into action: ‘Me hath my hapless brother hid from thee’, it says: ‘Revenge thyself on Balthazar and him, / For these were they that murdered thy son.’ ‘Red ink’ reads the practical note in the Quarto margin, and the letter tells Hieronimo that it has been written in blood for want of ink. So the paper flutters to the stage looking very like Hieronimo's bloody handkercher: another memento inciting revenge.

By the end of the act, his desire for retribution unsatisfied, kept from the king by his son's chief murderer, Lorenzo, Hieronimo has once more become desperate, and he turns back to ‘unfrequented paths’. Standing between the traditional tools of suicide, ‘a poniard in one hand, and a rope in the other’, he tries to decide which offers the better route to justice:

Hieronimo, 'tis time for thee to trudge:
Down by the dale that flows with purple gore,
Standeth a fiery tower: there sits a judge
Upon a seat of steel and molten brass …
Away, Hieronimo, to him be gone:
He'll do thee justice for Horatio's death.

(III. xii. 6-9, 12-13)

Alone on the empty stage, the character is caught in a crux. Dagger and halter become parts of the scene: ‘Turn down this path, thou shalt be with him straight, / Or this, and then thou need'st not take thy breath: / This way, or that way?’ Again, it is remembrance of his loss that breaks the deadlock: ‘if I hang or kill myself, let's know / Who will revenge Horatio's murder then?’ The weapons are thrown down, both paths rejected, and what stands between, the man remembering, goes forward to revenge, along ‘the middle path’ of three.

The same dialectic operates at the third and most formidable point of deadlocked uncertainty, found in the soliloquy ‘Vindicta mihi! …’ (III. xiii. 1-44). The first five lines of this, in which Hieronimo considers the possibility of leaving God to revenge his son, are made the more moving by his choice of Romans 12-13. As Knight Marshal, a legal official, the kind of ‘civil magistrate’ that the marginal glosses of the Geneva Bible equate with Paul's ‘minister of God’,¹⁶ Hieronimo is entitled to exact blood for the murder of his son. Yet because he would be acting in his own case—as a hating father not dispassionate judge—he cannot take the blood which in another sense he should.¹⁷ Destabilized by this, Hieronimo is denied that vengeance which, for Elizabethan audiences, was the most essential adjunct of his office. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that he should go on from Romans to consider contrary advice, taken from Seneca's Agamemnon: ‘Per scelus semper tutum est sceleribus iter.’¹⁸ Although it is not clear whether Hieronimo applies this paraphrase of Clytemnestra's decision to kill her husband to himself (who, like her, has a child to revenge) or to Lorenzo (who has a better claim to ‘scelus’), either way the line dictates action: vengeance or a pre-emptive strike. If he dithers, Hieronimo reflects, he will simply lose his life: ‘For he that thinks with patience to contend / To quiet life, his life shall easily end.’ Yet here the argument starts to recoil, for the ambiguity of ‘easily’ allows ‘patience’ and ‘quiet life’ to register as attractive positives even while they are being rejected as cowardly and dangerous. Hieronimo touches on a vein of soothing Senecanism indulged elsewhere by Balthazar's father, the King of Portugal:¹⁹ the patient man lives and dies in ease. His will, in other words, is puzzled, and he consoles himself with classical commonplaces. If destiny allows one to be happy, one will be; and if not, then one has the comfort of a tomb. Moreover (thinking now of a famous line from Pharsalia), if destiny denies even that, ‘Heaven covereth him that hath no burial.’ Suddenly his memory sparks into life: Horatio lies unburied because of his father's delay. ‘And to conclude',’ he says (though logically it is no conclusion), ‘I will revenge his death!’ The tangle of impulse and argument is broken through, and nothing more is heard of patience.

With Horatio's memory uppermost in his mind, the magistrate is offered “‘The humble supplication / Of Don Bazulto for his murder'd son’” (78-9). At first denying that anyone could claim such a bloody loss but himself, he then recognizes in Bazulto his ‘portrait’, his uncanny double, and offers to wipe the old man's tearful cheeks. As he draws out the handkercher, however, he is once again overwhelmed by remembrance, and, through that, by desire for revenge:

O no, not this: Horatio, this was thine,
And when I dy'd it in thy dearest blood,
This was a token 'twixt thy soul and me
That of thy death revenged I should be.

(86-9)

Hieronimo begins to rave about the journey he must make, down to ‘the dismal gates of Pluto's court’, within the walls of which ‘Proserpine may grant / Revenge on them that murdered my son’ (108-21). Why does he end this account (so reminiscent of Andrea's in the first scene) by tearing up the legal papers of Bazulto and his fellow petitioners? Because of his obsession with remembrance and revenge. Claiming that he has not damaged the documents, he says: ‘Shew me one drop of blood fall from the same.’ The papers are no concern of his: they are not the corpses of ‘Don Lorenzo and the rest’; he cannot therefore have touched them. Moreover, the sheets of paper written with ink, unlike Bel-imperia's letter inscribed with gore, offer no purchase to the memory: yielding no blood, they cannot resemble the handkercher; Hieronimo cannot therefore have consulted them. Not until the performance of that play of his own devising, ‘Soliman and Perseda’, in the fourth and final act, are the two impulses so crazily at work here fully resolved.

Even in Act III, however, there are signs that ‘doom’ will satisfy remembrance. When Hieronimo sits in judgement over Pedringano for shooting Serberine, he does not know that Bel-imperia's servant was complicit in the death of Horatio, and that the murder for which he is being tried is part of an intrigue planned by Lorenzo to wipe out witnesses to the earlier crime. Faithful to full retribution—‘blood with blood shall, while I sit as judge, / Be satisfied’ (III. vi. 35-6)—the Knight Marshal condemns Pedringano to death. Like an over-confident Calvinist, believing himself elect, Pedringano expects a ‘pardon’ for his crimes, a ‘remedy’, ‘good for the soul’ which will show that his master ‘hath remember'd’ him (51, 77, 21-2). This feint towards remembrance sheds ironic light on his end. Horatio, after all, was not simply run through with swords. He was ignominiously strung up, hanged like a common criminal. This is what happens to Pedringano when the stage's tragic scaffold imitates an executioner's platform and the hangman ‘turns him off’ (104). Hieronimo says more than he knows when he reflects, just before the hanging: ‘This makes me to remember thee, my son’ (98). And the retributive shape of memory is further invoked by the Deputy's insistence that Pedringano's body, like that of Horatio, lie ‘unburied’ (106). In Act III, Revenge directs a playlet without his hand being perceived by the characters. In the last act of the tragedy we witness a more conscious manipulation, by Hieronimo, of memory's vindictive dramaturgy.

Near the end of The Libation Bearers, Orestes displays the bodies of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra and the robe or net in which his father was murdered and summons up the past to justify his revenge to the Chorus: ‘Did she do it or did she not? My witness is / this great robe. It was thus she stained Aegisthus' sword. / Dip it and dip it again, the smear of blood conspires / with time to spoil the beauty of this precious thing’ (1010-13). The obvious Elizabethan parallel is Antony's speech to the mob in Julius Caesar, where Caesar's blood-stained robe is used to justify the revenge which the orator provokes in the people:

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle. I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on;
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii.
Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through;
See what a rent the envious Casca made;
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd,
And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it.

(III. ii. 169-78)

In chapter 3 of Le Temps retrouvé, Marcel's memory is prompted by the texture of a ‘napkin’:

the napkin which I had used to wipe my mouth had precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness as the towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face as I stood in front of the window on the first day of my arrival at Balbec, and this napkin now, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes's house, unfolded for me—concealed within its smooth surfaces and its folds—the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock.²⁰

Again there is an enormous shift in sensibility: for Hieronimo the past is sustained by the continuity of an object; it survives within Marcel experientially, as sensation, association, iridescence. But the link with Kyd, and even, though distantly, with Aeschylus, is there in the thought which the reverie evokes in Marcel: ‘je remarquais qu'il y aurait là, dans l'œuvre d'art que je me sentais prêt déjà … à entreprendre, de grandes difficultés.’²¹ Through the work of art which he, by undertaking, becomes, Proust's narrator can make his audience live through what has gone, but which, given the imperiousness of memory, seeks to command the present. Art can publish the past, even when it is private. Orestes creates a self-justificatory tableau out of the robe-net and the bodies, Antony performs a little play of passion over Caesar's corpse and mantle, and drama labours to communicate the significance of the handkercher which Hieronimo shows the court.

After the execution of Pedringano, a letter had been found in his pocket confirming the identity of Horatio's killers. When this missive was brought to Hieronimo, the outraged Knight Marshal had cried: ‘Holp he to murder mine Horatio? / And actors in th'accursed tragedy / Wast thou, Lorenzo, Balthazar and thou … ?’ (III. vii. 40-2). That drama returns when the ‘tragedy’ written by Hieronimo in his student days is performed before the court, the equivalent of Orestes' Chorus and Antony's mob. A reprisal effects a reprise. Once more a gentle knight is murdered so that his faithful mistress can be won by a royal lover. Balthazar plays what is (by this reckoning) his own part, that of Soliman, and Bel-imperia hers, that of the ‘Italian dame, / Whose beauty ravish'd all that her beheld’ (IV. i. 111-12). Horatio, however, cannot take the role of the knight Erasto, so Lorenzo does that, leaving Hieronimo to ‘play the murderer’ (133), the bashaw, the character who in the playlet is the equivalent of Lorenzo in ‘th'accursed tragedy’. When Soliman agrees to Erasto's death, reluctantly, as Balthazar does to Horatio's, Hieronimo stabs Lorenzo, the arbour scene returns, the court is invited to grasp those memories which cluster around the handkercher, and, in the death of Lorenzo in Horatio's role, revenge is clinched in remembrance.

From the outset, the impulse to violence is more problematic in Elsinore. When the ghost exhorts Hamlet to ‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther’, the prince's response is only superficially ‘apt’. ‘Haste me to know't,’ he says: ‘that I with wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge’ (I. v. 25, 29-31). ‘May’ is not ‘will’, and the overtones of ‘meditation’ and ‘thoughts of love’ are at odds with what seems in prospect. Left with the valediction ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu: remember me!’, however, Hamlet takes his task to heart with all the passion which he can muster:

                                                                      Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandement all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter.

(95-104)

An Orestes-figure so devoted to the past will find it hard to avenge. Symptomatically, the Jacobean hero of Thomas Goffe's Orestes borrows Hamlet's speech-rhythms but substitutes thoughts of action for memory: ‘Think on [thee], and revenge: yes, those two words / Shall serve as burden unto all my acts, / I will revenge, and then I'll think on thee …’²² No doubt the Prince of Denmark said something equally conventional in the Ur-Hamlet. But in Shakespeare he firmly concludes: ‘Now to my word: / It is “Adieu, adieu: remember me!” / I have sworn't’.²³ The contrast with Hieronimo is striking: Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember.

The language of this play is full of ‘memory’ and its cognates.²⁴ Hardly has it begun than it pauses to celebrate Old Hamlet as a representative of that lost and epic age in which political issues were decided by fierce, single combat, an age unlike that in which kings take power by poison and combat is a courtly exercise played with bated foils. After the nunnery scene, Ophelia recalls a lover whom we have never really known (‘O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!’ (III. ii. 150-61)), while the ballads which she sings in madness, remembering Polonius (‘His beard was as white as snow, / All flaxen was his pole, / He is gone, he is gone …’ (IV. v. 195-7)), are equally loyal to the past. Such memories divert and slow the play, giving it an eddying, onward inclusiveness which contrasts with the movement of Shakespeare's other tragedies and which significantly departs from the remembrance-driven dialectic of The Spanish Tragedy. Set against these recollective impulses, others appear more selfish. Though he admits that ‘The memory’ of his brother is ‘green’, Claudius insists on ‘remembrance of ourselves’ (I. ii. 1-2, 7). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accept from him ‘such thanks / As fits a king's remembrance’ (II. ii. 25-6). And Fortinbras winds up the tragedy by saying: ‘I have some rights, of memory in this kingdom, / Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me’ (V. ii. 389-90).

Such true, false, and cynical remembrances all reflect on the play's chief link with the past. Even before he sees the ghost, the prince remembers his father. When he first meets Horatio, for example, he almost sees the apparition which his friend has come to announce:

My father—methinks I see my father.
HORATIO:
Where, my lord?
HAMLET:
                                                  In my mind's eye, Horatio.
HORATIO:
I saw him once, 'a was a goodly king.
HAMLET:
'A was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

(I. ii. 184-8)

Hamlet fends off his friend's recollection of the public man—the shared, ‘goodly king’. His words advertise a privacy which remains his throughout the play. We can show that remembrance haunts him, even to the point of madness, and call this the heart of his mystery. But that heart can never, as he assures Guildenstern, be plucked out. In memory, Hamlet eludes us. Plainly, however, his words to Horatio are consistent with a degree of suffering. Even when comfort is found in the past, that only makes the present more desolate, ‘an unweeded garden / That grows to seed’ (I. ii. 135-6). In bereavement, as the psychologist John Bowlby observes, ‘because of the persistent and insatiable nature of the yearning for the lost figure, pain is inevitable’.²⁵ It is a measure of the prince's anguish that loss produces an exaggerated estimate of ‘the lost figure’. Old Hamlet becomes ‘So excellent a king, that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr; … Heaven and earth, / Must I remember?’ (I. ii. 139-43). Claudius calls his nephew's dejection ‘unmanly’, accusing him of ‘obstinate condolement’ (93-4). But he is not two months bereaved of a noble father, buried and replaced in the queen's bed with scandalous despatch. In any case, we know that Hamlet, healthily enough, is trying to shake off at least part of the burden of his father's memory.

For the ‘tenders’ of ‘affection’ made to Ophelia ‘of late’—which can only mean since his return from Wittenberg for the funeral of his father²⁶—show the prince attempting to replace a dead love-object with a living one. His inky cloak is ambiguous: a mark of respect for his father, it also indicates his desire eventually to detach himself from him. As Freud points out in ‘Trauer und Melancholie’, mourning has a psychical task to perform: to detach the survivor's memories and hopes from the dead.²⁷ A combination of things prevents Hamlet from effecting that ‘severance’ which Helena (in a related play of ‘remembrance’) achieves even before the action of All's Well that Ends Well gets under way. Despite her Hamlet-like garb of mourning, her first soliloquy (reversing the prince's) admits that, because of her devotion to Bertram, ‘I think not on my father … I have forgot him’ (I. i. 79-82). Ophelia's apparent rejection is one factor in Hamlet's distress: by returning his letters and refusing him access she throws his love back onto the father who has never (it would seem) emotionally betrayed him. Another is Claudius' refusal to let him return to school in Wittenberg: this leaves the prince surrounded by people and places which remorselessly remind him of the dead king. But most important, of course, is the injunction, ‘Remember me!’ With this command the ghost condemns Hamlet to an endless, fruitless ‘yearning for the lost figure’. In the nunnery and closet scenes, we see the effect on his sanity.

‘My lord,’ says Ophelia, ‘I have remembrances of yours / That I have longed long to redeliver. / I pray you now receive them’ (III. i. 92-4). This confirms for Hamlet a suspicion bred of his mother's ‘o'er-hasty marriage’, that woman's love is brief and unworthy. It seems that Ophelia wants to divest herself of every shred of attachment. In this she is no better than Gertrude, glad to forget her first husband. Moreover, the girl's gesture, ‘There, my lord’ (III. i. 101), recalls an earlier situation: Old Hamlet, like Ophelia, had pressed on the prince remembrances that were too much his already. In saying her farewells, Ophelia is, in effect, forcing him to remember (and no doubt, though an instrument of Polonius' plots, she does want to reclaim his attention). Through the loss of Ophelia, Hamlet feels that of his father—which is why the hysteria which follows is in excess of its apparent object. The sexuality which the prince denounces is that of his mother as well as Ophelia; Claudius, as well as he, is an ‘arrant knave’;²⁸ and there is indeed a sad resonance to the question—whether or not Polonius' surveillance is suspected—‘Where's your father?’ (129). ‘Hysterics’, wrote Freud and Breuer, ‘suffer mainly from reminiscences.’²⁹

The queen triggers Hamlet's raving in her bedchamber by calling Claudius ‘your father’ (III. iv. 9). Forced by this to compare one king with another, Hamlet insists that his mother do the same. As he shows her the counterfeit presentments, the pictures of her two husbands, that tormented, idealizing remembrance which had filled his first soliloquy overwhelms him:

See what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.

(55-62)

‘'A was a man, take him for all in all’: the audience is carried back to that almost hallucinatory moment when Old Hamlet drifted into the prince's ‘mind's eye’. And this time the ghost, fancied even more vividly, appears, suspended between spiritual and imaginative existence. ‘In melancholy men’, writes Burton of the phantasy, ‘this faculty is most powerful and strong, and often hurts, producing many monstrous and prodigious things, especially if it be stirred up by some terrible object, presented to it from … memory’.³⁰ Hamlet sees a prodigy, but Gertrude, who has forgotten, does not.

It may seem rash to define Hamlet's derangement in terms of remembrance when we have Polonius' warning that ‘to define true madness, / What is't but to be nothing else but mad?’ (II. ii. 93-4). Yet this is, in fact, encouraging, for by its logic one character is amply qualified to offer a definition. In a tragedy largely dominated by assumed, or partly assumed, insanity, Ophelia's derangement is terminally authentic. And when, in a sequence which parallels the nunnery scene, she gives her brother, like Hamlet before him, remembrances, she says: ‘There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.’ The language of these flowers is not left to speak for itself; Ophelia provides a gloss. And lest an audience overlook the allusion, Shakespeare spells out the moral. ‘A document in madness,’ Laertes translates, ‘thoughts and remembrance fitted’ (IV. v. 175-9).

Where does that leave revenge? In the body of the play, as in the first exchange with the ghost, it is far less important to Hamlet than is the impulse to remember. That imbalance is plainly dramatized in the performance of The Murder of Gonzago. ‘Soliman and Perseda’ was staged to effect Hieronimo's revenge, but there is never any question of Claudius being killed in or at ‘The Mousetrap’. Perhaps Hamlet does stage the play to test the word of the ghost. Presumably he is not simply rationalizing when he says that it will ‘catch the conscience of the King’ (II. ii. 605). But the crucial motive is revealed to Ophelia just before the show begins: ‘O heavens, die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year, but by'r lady, 'a must build churches then, or else shall 'a suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, “For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot’” (III. ii. 130-5). Hamlet recovers the orchard as Hieronimo the arbour, but the prince does so because he wants to see his father alive again and to help the ‘great man's memory’ survive. Revenge is so stifled by remembrance that, when the Player King announces ‘Purpose is but the slave to memory’ (188), he does more than gird unwittingly at Gertrude's forgetfulness of her husband: ironies spark from the prince's retrospective tardiness to the thought that, precisely by remembering his father, he neglects what Old Hamlet's spirit³¹ wants him to do. Only the transformation of ‘The Mousetrap’'s murderer from brother to nephew—making him the equivalent of Hamlet rather than Claudius—reveals the prince's guilty sense that if he could but abandon himself, become as crude and cruel as ‘Lucianus, nephew to the king’ (244), he could satisfy the ghost.

With characteristic audacity, Shakespeare gives Hamlet his best chance of killing the king (before the confusions of the denouement) immediately after ‘The Mousetrap’. As he goes to see his mother in the bedchamber, the prince comes upon Claudius at prayer. Has he not just seen his father killed afresh, and been persuaded³² of his uncle's guilt by his reaction to the playlet? Now Hamlet can become Lucianus, and he takes up the role with relish, both in resolving to strike—‘Now might I do it pat, now 'a is a-praying; / And now I'll do't’—and in deciding against:

No!
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th'incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At game a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't—
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven …

(III. iii. 73-4, 87-93)

Dr Johnson is not the only commentator to have been appalled by this. Others have spoken, more cautiously, of rationalization. What matters, however, is the emergence of these sentiments from thoughts of reciprocity. ‘'A took my father grossly, full of bread,’ Hamlet says, ‘With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May’ (80-1). Now that the playlet has recovered the past, showing Old Hamlet asleep in his orchard, ‘unhous'led, disappointed, unanel'd’ (I. v. 77), the punitive inadequacy of anything but complete retribution is freshly in mind. Through the Lucianus-like ruthlessness of his speech Hamlet registers a recognition that revenge is incoherent unless it possesses that recapitulative power which (pace Hieronimo) the passage of experience makes impossible. If the prince found Claudius gaming or swearing, he would want him asleep in an orchard, and not now but then. In other words, his prevarication anticipates problems about punishment in time which I shall discuss in Chapter 11. Here, it is enough to notice that, in so far as The Murder of Gonzago stirs thoughts of the past, it not only compromises action by substituting remembrance for revenge but points up the incoherence of violence by staging a more persuasive recapitulation than stabbing in the back could contrive.

In any case, Hamlet cannot become a Lucianus, and so does not revenge his father. The weapons finally used to kill Claudius (the venomous rapier and celebratory, poisoned drink) mark the attack as spontaneous retaliation, not long-nurtured vengeance. The king dies for the murder of Gertrude and the prince, not for a poisoning in the orchard. Old Hamlet does not return to triumph over the corpses of his enemies, like the satisfied ghost of Andrea at the end of The Spanish Tragedy. Memory being private, the audience cannot even tell whether Hamlet is thinking about his father during these critical minutes. Old Hamlet is simply not mentioned in the turbulent last phase of the play—an omission which seems the more remarkable when Laertes, who is being hurried off by the fell sergeant death with yet more despatch than the prince, finds time to refer to Polonius. Hamlet knows that revenge would gratify the stern, militaristic father whom he loves, and he appears to want to please him; but he cannot overcome his radical sense of its pointlessness. Claudius has killed Old Hamlet and whored the queen. Neither evil can be undone. Revenge cannot bring back what has been lost. Only memory, with all its limitations, can do that.

Nowhere is this lesson brought home more forcefully than in the graveyard scene (V. i). As they delve about in the clay, the gravediggers turn up the past as it really is: earth indistinguishable from earth, skulls, loggat bones. This might be a politician's pate, or a courtier's, says the prince. And might this not be the skull of a lawyer? ‘It might, my lord’ (81); but, equally, it might not. None of Hamlet's speculations can give life to this bony refuse. The skulls remain, despite his efforts, terrifying, vacant emblems, mouthing the memento mori truism: ‘Fui non sum, es non eris.’³³ Even if it was inspired by Aeschylus, this sequence is so steeped in Christian ars moriendi³⁴ as to have moved beyond the classicism which consoled and spurred Hieronimo. Only one of the bony relics can, temporarily, escape the bleak commonplaces of piety. When the prince learns that he holds the skull of Yorick, he is able to give it form and feature: ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times’ (184-6). Yorick's link with life is fragile, though. Only his small fame, lingering in the minds of gravedigger and prince, shows what a piece of work he was. The rest of him, like every other bone in the cemetery, signifies death: ‘Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come’ (192-4).

Alexander came to it, and so did ‘imperious Caesar’. Even now one might be stopping a bung-hole and the other patching a wall. Why does Hamlet consider the fate of these great men so curiously? Certainly because ‘Fui non sum …’ has struck home: he recognizes the inevitability of his own death, as his fideistic or fatalistic speech on the fall of the sparrow shows (V. ii. 219-24). But he is also interested in these emperors because they are men remembered.³⁵ Perhaps it does not matter that their mortal remains have come to base ends: they persist in men's minds none the less. If the graveyard focuses Hamlet's imagination on his approaching end, it also reminds him of the possibility of survival. That is why Horatio is so important to him in the final scene:

You that look pale, and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

(V. ii. 334-40)

Yet, can Horatio report either Hamlet or his cause aright? His brief account to Fortinbras, with its ‘carnal, bloody and unnatural acts … accidental judgements, casual slaughters’ (380-5), suggests that he cannot, for everything that seems essential to Hamlet's tragedy is left out. Honest, compassionate, and intelligent though he is, Horatio is not equipped by circumstance to inform the yet unknowing world about the nunnery scene, Claudius' words to heaven, ‘To be or not to be’ or, indeed, any of those perplexed soliloquies.³⁶ Only the play can report such things, which is why the dramatic imagery of Hamlet's speech is so interesting.

When John Pykerying turned to Lydgate's Troy Book to find material for Horestes, he found a distinctly gloomy view of fame and memory. ‘O vnsur trust of al worldly glorie, / With sodeyn chaunge put oute of memorie!’, laments Lydgate at the death of Agamenoun, ‘O ydel fame, blowe up to þe skye, / Ouer-whelmyd with twyncling of an eye!’ (V. 1011-12, 1015-16). The Elizabethan dramatist's attitude could not be more different. For him it is Agamemnon's fame which makes him worth revenging. Moreover, it is fame which in his version of the story offers the strongest suasion both for and against the murder of Clytemnestra. Think what evil Oedipus did in killing his parent, Nature urges Horestes, ‘And eke remember now what fame of him a brode doth go’; to which Idumeus counters, having encouraged persistence in revenge: ‘remembar well the same; / In doing thus you shall pourchas to the[e] immortaull fame, / The which I hope you wyll assaye for to atchife in dede.’³⁷ Lydgate wrote as a medieval cleric and Pykeryng as an aspiring politician during a period notoriously fascinated by ‘fame, that all hunt after in their lives’.³⁸ But Pykeryng was also dramatizing a story which was merely told in his source. He therefore found himself considering the springs of Horestes' action, his link with his dead father, and Agamemnon's survival through renown.

In the event, fame, the subject of a few lines in the Troy Book, seemed so important to Pykerying that he made it into a dramatic character. After the murder of Clytemnestra, Fame comes on stage clutching the gold and iron trumpets through which she announces good and bad deeds to eternity:

A bove eache thinge, kepe well thy fame, what ever that thou lose;
For fame, once gone, th[y] memory with fame a way it gose;
And it once lost, thou shalt in south accomptyd lyke to be
A drope of rayne that faulyth in the bosom of the see.

(830-93)

Or, to put it in Hamlet's terms: unless a man is remembered, he is no more after his death than a ‘pate full of fine dirt’ (V. i. 107-8). But the most significant connection between Horestes and Shakespeare's play lies in Fame's role as presenter. She tells us what is happening both in and just outside the action. So the play which Fame presents dramatizes the fame which she personifies. This is one reason why Horestes—though it does not link its revenger with the lost object through meditatively convoluted remembrance—is so unlike Greek tragedy. Pykeryng shows us, through Fame, that what we are seeing is the performance of an action. Aeschylus' actors are the prattontes of Aristotle's Poetics, a term which John Jones translates well as ‘the doers of what is done’.³⁹ Pykeryng's actors re-enact rather than do. We are made aware that Horestes was, and that he is being played; there is a sense in which the fact that he is being played in itself proves him worth playing. Any performance of Pykeryng's drama constitutes an act of analytical commemoration.

It should now be clear why the tragedians of the city are so prominent in Hamlet. Clearly the prince is interested in them because of his obsession with ‘seeming’ and ‘being’, and because they can act while divorcing themselves from their actions—which is what Hamlet would have to do if he were to revenge his father. They also interest him, however, because they make remembrance their profession. The prince must struggle to keep his promise to the ghost, to preserve his memory for only a few months against the tide of the world's indifference, but the first player can reach back effortlessly to the crash of ‘senseless Ilium’ and the murder of Priam (II. ii. 434-522). So vividly does he make the dead King of Troy live, that Hamlet has the players do the same for another dead king—his father—in The Murder of Gonzago. The most extended and public act of remembrance in Hamlet, ‘The Mousetrap’ moves on from Troy to dramatize the more immediate past of Vienna and, through that, Denmark, before melting into the present of the larger play, the murder in the orchard being effected and unpunished, the murderer being happily in possession of both crown and queen.

Throughout Hamlet, the prince's obsession with actors and acting, together with his allusions to revenge tragedy, work to divorce the character from the actor who represents him. When Burbage or Olivier calls on those who are ‘audience to this act’, members of the theatre audience are drawn within the scope of the hero's attention as surely as the pale and trembling Danes, but also made aware that, just as the squeaking boy is not Cleopatra,⁴⁰ so the actor is not the Hamlet which in another sense he is. The character seems to protest through the imagery that he is too elusively himself to be inhabited by another. Nothing could more clearly mark the difference between ancient and Elizabethan conceptions of dramatic identity than the absence of such imagery from Greek tragedy.⁴¹ Meanwhile, the Hamlet audience acknowledges, as it would at a performance of Horestes, that it is witnessing, in the dramatic spectacle, both the death of a ‘great man’ and an act which celebrates his memory. The duplicity is similar to that created by Shakespeare's Cassius, when, having prepared ‘imperious Caesar’ to patch a wall, he asks: ‘How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!’ (III. i. 111-13). And the dramatic imagery invoked by Hieronimo when he, like Hamlet, faces death (making a suicidal gesture which remembers Horatio) might also be compared: ‘gentles, thus I end my play: / Urge no more words, I have no more to say. He runs to hang himself’ (IV. iv. 151-2). But if the mechanism at work in Horestes, Julius Caesar, and The Spanish Tragedy is similar to that used in Hamlet, its effect is more poignant in the later play. In Horestes, the case for remembrance is put by an abstraction, Fame; in Julius Caesar, it is sought for the sake of a dead, rather than by a dying, man; and Hieronimo's dramatic imagery—as might be expected from a protagonist who has constantly subordinated remembrance to the revenge which it incites—has a memorial implication which is scarcely more than latent. But in Hamlet the appeal for just report has the weight of the play behind it. It comes from a dying hero who, having devoted himself to memory, now asks to be remembered. The appeal is enacted. It is satisfied in its performance.

Notes

1. Lattimore's ‘Think of’, in the Chicago translation, is an inexplicable rendering of ‘memnēso’ [Aeschylus, Tragedies, tr. Richard Lattimore et al., in David Grene and Lattimore (eds.), The Complete Greek Tragedies, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1959)].

2. On the Homeric passage see [Jean-Pierre] Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, [Boston, 1983] 77-8.

3. Cf. The Choephoroe (‘The Libation Bearers’), tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, rev. edn. (London, 1979), line 648n.

4. See e.g. Plato's Theatetus, 191d-e, Phaedrus, 275d.

5. La Mémoire et l'oubli dans la pensée grecque jusqu'à la fin de V^e siècle avant J. C. (Paris, 1982), 219.

6. Lines 796-7, 1225-39. Cf. [Michèle] Simondon, La Mémoire et l'oubli, [Paris, 1982] 219.

7. The Second Part of the Iron Age (1612-13), in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 6 vols. (1874; New York, 1964), iii. 421-2.

8. Ibid. 405.

9. S. C. Humphreys, The Family, Women and Death: Comparative Studies, 2nd edn. (Ann Arbor, 1993), 157.

10. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1977), 85-110.

11. Louise Schleiner, ‘Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare's Writing of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41 (1990), 29-48.

12. Ibid. 39.

13. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London, 1959), II. v. 51-6.

14. e.g. [Fredson] Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, [Princeton, 1940] 68.

15. Cf. the ‘doom’ of the King of Spain at I. ii. 173-97, judging between Lorenzo and Horatio.

16. For other applications of the phrase see Mary Mroz, Divine Vengeance (Washington, DC, 1941), 32-9.

17. On this conflict see e.g. William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (1639), III. iii. 4-7.

18. ‘Per scelera semper sceleribus tutum est iter’ (‘through crime ever is the safe way for crime’), line 115, in Seneca: ‘Tragedies’ [London, 1929], ed. and tr. [Frank Justus] Miller.

19. e.g. I. iii. 5-42, III. xiv. 31-4.

20. Marcel Proust, Time Regained, tr. Andreas Major, rev. edn. (London, 1970), 226.

21. À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, 3 vols. (Paris, 1954), iii. 870-1.

22. The Tragedy of Orestes (1633), G3^r, modernized.

23. Lines 110-12. Cf. the parting of Laertes from Polonius, where a father again imposes precepts upon a son's remembrance (I. iii. 68-81).

24. The word occurs more than twice as often in Hamlet as in any other play by Shakespeare; ‘remember’ is also more plentiful here than elsewhere in the canon.

25. Loss: Sadness and Depression (London, 1980), 26.

26. I. iii. 91, 99-100; cf. Anne Barton, introd. to Hamlet, ed. T. J. B. Spencer and Stanley Wells (Harmondsworth, 1980), 24-7.

27. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917 (1915)), tr. Joan Riviere (rev. James Strachey et al.), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1966-74), xiii. 243-58. German die Trauer, like ‘mourning’, covers both the affect and the garb of bereavement.

28. Line 128; cf. I. v. 124.

29. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1893-5), tr. James and Alix Strachey, Standard Edition of Freud, gen. ed. Strachey, ii. 7.

30. The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London, 1932), 159 (pt. 1, s. 1, mem. 2, subs. 7).

31. The claim that the ghost may be a devil, impersonating the king—see e.g. Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 2nd edn. (Stanford, Calif., 1971), chs. 4-5—impinges on the play's histrionic concerns here, but does not otherwise greatly complicate its mnemonics.

32. But see above [in John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon, 1996], p. 79.

33. ‘I am not as I was, you will not be as you are.’ For Shakespearean contexts see e.g. Marjorie Garber, ‘“Remember Me”: Memento Mori Figures in Shakespeare's Plays’, Renaissance Drama, ns 12 (1981), 3-25, and Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance ‘Hamlet’: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, 1984), ch. 6.

34. See e.g. Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the ‘Ars Moriendi’ in England (New Haven, 1970), and Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London, 1984).

35. For some of the variables involved, see Peter Burke, ‘History as Social Memory’, in Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford, 1989), 97-113.

36. On the difficulty of Horatio's task see Constantine Cavafy's poem, ‘King Claudius’.

37. Horestes, 441, 492-4, in Marie Axton (ed.), Three Tudor Classical Interludes (Woodbridge, 1982).

38. Love's Labour's Lost, I. i. 1.

39. On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, [London, 1962] 59.

40. Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 219-21.

41. See Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, corr. repr. (Oxford, 1989), 132-3.